Your DVDs Are Obsolete!

. . . or they will be . . . sooner than you imagine.

Here’s the deal:

You know how George Lucas announced at first that he wouldn’t release the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD until after Episode 3 comes out in 2005–then he released it suddenly last month?

You know how they are currently releasing Star Trek: Voyager season-by-season on DVD and then decided to release the original Star Trek series on DVD at the same time–instead of maximizing their profits by getting one series completely out and then releasing the next so that it doesn’t overtax the Trekkies’ pocketbooks?

You know how they are currently talking about releasing Star Trek: Enterprise on DVD next year even though the series isn’t even complete yet (contrary to the normal way Star Trek series are released)?

You didn’t know that? Well, now you do.

There’s a reason for all this sudden releasing of DVDs.

The reason is called Blu-Ray.

Blu-Ray is widely viewed as the REPLACEMENT for DVDs. It is expected to make DVDs obsolete.

The Blu-Ray format uses disks the size of CDs/DVDs but packs 25-50 gigs of data onto them (that’s 13-26 hours of programming, compared to 2-4 hours of programming in the DVD format). One Blu-Ray disk could hold a whole season of a TV program.

And if you want video quality rather than quantity, Blu-Ray beats DVD by similar margins. It can pack far more HDTV onto a disk than something in DVD format could.

As a result, Blu-Ray is expected to be the hot new format that will make DVD obsolete. It has the major industry players behind it, who are currently developing commercial versions of their Blu-Ray players/recorders.

These are expected to hit the market in 2005-2006.

That’s why we’re getting all these sooner-than-expected DVD releases right now.

The companies are afraid that Blu-Ray will roll right over DVD and quickly make it obsolete, depriving the companies of their chance to make money off the DVD format. So they’re rushing DVD releases of their programs out in anticipation of Blu-Ray bursting onto the market.

Is this a sound marketing strategy?

Well . . . I’m glad to be able to get DVDs of favored stuff sooner-than-expected. But I doubt the release of Blu-Ray will change things too much. I’ve already got Bablyon 5 on DVD, so I’m not inclined to buy it on Blu-Ray just so I can reduce the number of disks I have to put into the player in order to watch the whole thing in one run.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want to buy DVDs now or wait for Blu-Ray versions of your favorite programs to start to be released (probably several years from now).

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BLU-RAY.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

15 thoughts on “Your DVDs Are Obsolete!”

  1. I think any regular DVDs will still play in the new Blu-ray players…so it’s not quite the same kind of obsolesence that came with the switch from VHS to DVD.
    It’s only an issue for you if you have a fancy HDTV and you absolutely have to have the HD Super Star Wars Ultra Edition Special with Extra Features™!!!!!!.
    These “upgrades” will keep on happening until the disks can hold movies with 4000 lines of resolution, which is supposed to be what the original film has.
    For most people though, DVD is “good enough”. I don’t think people are going to be so enthusiastic about purchasing their whole collections again. Blockbuster will still have to carry regular DVDs of everything for at least 10 years. It feels like DVDs just came out a few years ago. My parents just got their first DVD player this year.

  2. Question, Jim:
    Is blu-ray going to be back-compatible? Will DVD’s and CD’s work on the thing? If the disc is the same size, it would be nice if they made them to work together.

  4. Interesting. Having just entered the IT industry, I’m excited about the future evolution of technology. I’m wondering if maybe thirty years from now we’ll have like 800 Terahertz CPUs, 40 TB hard drives, 500 GB optical media, etc.

  5. I wonder if Blu-ray or HD-DVD will win out in the end of the format war. I bet it will be blu-ray; Sony always gets their way, as I hope they do with SACD over DVD-Audio.

  6. Sony always gets their way
    Yeah, right. That’s why all the video shops were still renting BETA videotapes until DVD ran them off.

  7. The push to get the DVD’s out on the market now is to circumvent the inevitable piracy of the content. With the ease of using your DVR to move digital content from any provider to any disk format, the content owners want to get their piece of the pie now, rather than waiting and losing it later when digital piracy is even easier than it is today.
    Blu-ray is cool, though.

  10. I’m not sure what an emerging new medium has to do with the decision by the producers/owners of content on when to release that content to the home market.
    Are the owners of the Star Trek franchise (for example) somehow invested in DVD as a format? Would it not be just as easy for them to release their shows on this new format?

  14. I own over 1,700 DVD’s (none of them being blue ray or HD)… does this mean they will be obsolete in the next couple of years? Or will I still be able to use them on an HDDVD player? Thanks..

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